Mortgage pressures and disturbing echoes of the '80s

Taken together with the likely rise in interest rates, new money for Help to Buy, and the UK's overall (longstanding) housing problem, this starts to remind me of the housing bubble of the late 1980s, when lots of younger people (my generation) were tempted into the housing market by a short window of cheap mortgages.

As we know, this later unravelled around Black Wednesday in 1992, when interest rates soared as we exited the ERM. History won't repeat itself exactly, but there are echoes here of the same sense of needing to find a way to get on an increasingly inaccessible housing ladder.

The result had a profound impact on those involved, on firm's balance sheets and on regulation. Arguably, for example, it was one of the roots of the demutualisation movement, which itself....

Mortgage regulation has obviously moved on since. But its current incarnation, the MMR, was designed largely with the financial crisis in mind, and may need to adapt (and become more flexible) to help firms meet some new challenges.

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Young first-time buyers are increasing their overall mortgage debt in order to tackle short-term financial pressures.